Many of us rely on LinkedIn as a key HR, sales, career development and business tool. Some of LinkedIn’s ability to engage its users is its elegant use of gamification elements – from completeness bars to competitive game elements that compare a LinkedIn user to their peers. All this makes the LinkedIn environment compelling to many people and results in their investing in making their LinkedIn profiles and the data in them. Let’s examine how this is accomplished and what lessons can be learned for enterprise gamification.

This raises, of course, the interesting question of whether competition – gamified competition as exemplified in the LinkedIn example – discourages or encourages users. More importantly, it makes us carefully consider the use of completion oriented elements vs competition oriented game elements.